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Tolkien 4.0 (A dark and hungry sea lion arises)


Ser Scot A Ellison
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  • 2 months later...

I think Tolkien's position was that reading Shakespeare was a bit of a pointless exercise without watching the plays performed. I've met a fair few people  who disliked reading some of the plays, but liked watching them, so I do think there's an important value in seeing them rather than just reading them. 


Also is it me or is judging the adult Tolkien's views on an author based on his possible teenage opinions a bit odd? As if someone's tastes and views don't develop, deepen and potentially change with time.  :wacko:

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4 hours ago, Ser Drewy said:

Also is it me or is judging the adult Tolkien's views on an author based on his possible teenage opinions a bit odd? As if someone's tastes and views don't develop, deepen and potentially change with time.  :wacko:

Exactly. Quite apart from the obvious point that it was a school debate (and hence maybe not his own opinions), the guy was a teenager, and Anti-Stratfordianism was commonplace at the time.

I think the episode is useful to consider in context though, since it clearly gets treated as Exhibit A for Tolkien disliking Shakespeare, when really it was just a reflection of Tolkien interacting with a particular intellectual fad.

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On 10/12/2020 at 9:41 PM, Ser Drewy said:

I think Tolkien's position was that reading Shakespeare was a bit of a pointless exercise without watching the plays performed. I've met a fair few people  who disliked reading some of the plays, but liked watching them, so I do think there's an important value in seeing them rather than just reading them. 


Also is it me or is judging the adult Tolkien's views on an author based on his possible teenage opinions a bit odd? As if someone's tastes and views don't develop, deepen and potentially change with time.  :wacko:

Some Shakespeare plays do read well, others are dry as dust.  But, really I think that any play has to be seen to really appreciate it.

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The weirdest thing... I suspect that this episode only gets attention because we're currently going through an Anti-Stratfordian Renaissance (which the internet may well have aggravated). In the second half of the twentieth century, it would have caused some headscratching and nothing more. Now? Anti-Stratfordians are a Thing again.

(It's rather like if Phrenology made a comeback).

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32 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

“Anti-Stradfordian” = opposition to teaching Shakespeare?

Anti-Stratfordian = someone who thinks that the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were actually written by someone else. Has sub-varieties, depending on their favoured candidate (Baconian, Oxfordian, Marlovian, Derbyite). Very popular 1850-1950, forgotten 1950-2000, and on the rise since 2000.

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1 minute ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Anti-Stratfordian = someone who thinks that the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were actually written by someone else. Has sub-varieties, depending on their favoured candidate (Baconian, Oxfordian, Marlovian, Derbyite). Very popular 1850-1950, forgotten 1950-2000, and on the rise since 2000.

Oh, that BS.  Got it.

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8 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Anti-Stratfordian = someone who thinks that the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were actually written by someone else. Has sub-varieties, depending on their favoured candidate (Baconian, Oxfordian, Marlovian, Derbyite). Very popular 1850-1950, forgotten 1950-2000, and on the rise since 2000.

Comeback, you say? Now seems the ideal time to claim I invented time-travel and went back, and wrote all the good ones. B)

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Oooh. A downloadable transcript of the verses in the incredibly rare Songs for the Philologists:

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:32873/

As a background, this is a 1936 collection of humorous Old English, Old Norse, and Other poetry, by Tolkien and E.V. Gordon. It was printed as a booklet by students at University College... only for a wartime bombing to destroy nearly all the copies. Only fourteen survive, making this the rarest Tolkien book. 

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I disagree with his answer about Sauron using Tengwar. Put it this way - I use a Latin alphabet, despite not being Roman, and Arabic numerals, despite not being an Arab... Tengwar is a tool, not something limited to Elves only.

(More speculatively, Sauron's interactions with Celebrimbor and the Smiths might have meant that using Tengwar was a necessity to successfully bind the other Rings to his own. But that is just speculation). 

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I think we've heard this before, but Entertainment Weekly have a bit of information about the upcoming book Nature of Middle-Earth: https://ew.com/books/new-collection-previously-unseen-j-r-r-tolkien-writing-coming-next-year/

Pretty incredible that we're still getting more material. Information on the lands and animals of Numenor, new writing about Elvish immortality and reincarnation amongst other things. Very interesting. 

 

 

Edited by Ser Drewy
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I remember Hofstetter from the alt.fan.tolkien days. He's as good a choice as one can think of -- he had contact with Christopher Tolkien and other family members, and I think was the first to convey that not only was CT opposed to the LotR films, but that CT saw the first film and greatly disliked it (Hofstetter indicated that CT gave him some detailed reasons and specific critiques, but he would not share them; but I suspect that his own critiques of the films, namely that PJ reduced the gravitas or grandeur of some characters and events to appeal to the lowest common denominator, probably closely echo what bothered CT).

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I guess the book is going to collect some stuff previously published in VT and PE (it seems like the piece about rivers and beacon-hills will be in there as well as the Ósanwe-kenta text) but hopefully there will also be some completely new stuff.

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4 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

I guess the book is going to collect some stuff previously published in VT and PE (it seems like the piece about rivers and beacon-hills will be in there as well as the Ósanwe-kenta text) but hopefully there will also be some completely new stuff.

Yeah, I've seen some people assessing that this is a collection of obscure Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon material, put together in a more user-friendly format. Even if it is... it'd be great (I myself have read the entire HOME, but have never read VT or PE). Hopefully the length of the volume also implies new stuff too.

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1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

For those interested in Hostetter's analysis of the LotR films, his thoughts on the topic can be found via Google Groups.

Have to say on that one that the lack of the spirit ghosts/wind stuff for both Sauron and Saruman were things I was very much annoyed by, too. Those could have been spooky scenes in their own right which could have actually fitted pretty well with Jackson's aesthetics.

And they are indeed rather important both on a symbolic level as well as helping with the overall world-building stuff.

And, I mean, spirit Sauron - already a completely nonsense in the first movie since it is rather obvious in the novels that the guy has taken on a new body millennia ago - turning into this ridiculous pitiful and outright laughable Barad-dûr bedside lamp (I don't think there is a more pitiful way to depict a devil-like being than as a giant eye glued to a (collapsing) tower) was perhaps the worst call they could have made.

They even seem to have realized this when they made those Hobbit movies. The spirit Sauron at Dol Guldur appears to be more powerful/intimidating and impressive than anything we saw of Sauron in the LotR movies.

But, damn, now I remember how much I dislike those movies.

The last time I watched them was always either by ways of Kerr's 'Red Book version' of the movies as six movies based on the six books of Tolkien's novel or by Sharkey's purist version to be found in that search: https://ifdb.fanedit.org/fanedit-search/search-results/?query=all&scope=title&keywords=Lord+of+the+rings&order=rdate

Kerr's edits can even be found here if you know how to search a database: http://fanedit.info/fanedits/

And of course there are similar cuts also available for the Hobbit movies. A cursory glance reveals that pretty much all fan cuts made cut this freak monster severely down...

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